Area clinic prepares for abortion law's impact

Candy Gibbs was preparing to go to college, but she faced an adult decision. She jumped aboard an emotional roller coaster when she found out she was pregnant as a high school senior.

“I was in a situation where my parents and I panicked, and when you find yourself in a crisis, you experience every kind of emotion — fear, shame, embarrassment, anger,” she said. “If you make a quick decision, it’s oftentimes one you regret.”

Feeling pressure from a panicking family to keep the pregnancy private and anticipating a lack of involvement on the father’s end, Gibbs chose to have an abortion. Had she carried through with the pregnancy, her child would have turned 21 this year.

“Now, I’m married with three kids, and I still miss that baby,” she said. “I didn’t get to take her to kindergarten. I didn’t watch her graduate from high school. And that’s something I’ll miss for the rest of my life.”

Now Gibbs serves as executive director of CareNet Crisis Pregnancy Center of Amarillo, which offers women free pregnancy tests, an ultrasound and childbirth and parenting classes. As an anti-abortion organization, the facility does not provide abortion referrals, she said.

In 2010, 307 women from Randall and Potter counties received an abortion, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services, but there are no facilities that offer the procedure in the Amarillo area.

The closest abortion clinic to Amarillo, Lubbock’s Planned Parenthood Women’s Health Center, is among the majority of facilities offering the procedure in the state that abortion-rights activists said would be severely affected and perhaps shuttered by new state laws.

On Thursday, Gov. Rick Perry signed into law a bill that requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, mandates abortions be performed in surgical centers and bans abortions after 20 weeks. Only five of 42 abortion clinics in Texas currently meet the requirements to be a surgical center.

“My reaction is what (the laws) are trying to establish is to ensure safe care of the woman,” Gibbs said. “Why would we not want a doctor to have hospital privileges, why would we not want the necessary equipment needed for surgery when performing a surgery in a clinic, and why would a woman not make the decision prior to five months?”

Leading up to the passage of the bill, abortion-rights activists expressed concerns that the new regulations would force the bulk of abortion clinics in Texas to close.

But Claudia Stravato, former director of Amarillo’s Planned Parenthood that shut down in 2010, thinks the changes will not affect Texas Panhandle women’s access to safe abortions. She said many women pursuing the procedure here travel more than four hours to Albuquerque, N.M.

When she was at Planned Parenthood, the facility gave women who inquired about abortions a brochure that listed contact information for Texas clinics and provided them with information about adoption agencies and Medicaid if they chose to keep the child, Stravato said.

The CEO of Haven Health Clinic declined to comment on information the facility offers to pregnant women.

The Lubbock clinic doesn’t offer surgical abortions, so women already travel to Albuquerque, Midland or farther to receive the procedure. It is also one of the facilities that doesn’t meet new regulations.

Medication abortions, which cost $650 at the Lubbock clinic, are offered up to nine weeks.

Even before passage of the new abortion laws, abortion clinics were regulated differently than other medical facilities, said Merritt Tierce, executive director of Texas Equal Access Fund, an organization that assists low-income women with abortion costs.

For instance, Tierce said, the 2011 sonogram bill required an abortion doctor to administer sonograms, a procedure that is generally performed by sonogram techs in other types of medical facilities.

The only physician who performs abortions in Lubbock travels from Midland once a week to administer medication abortions. The doctor does not have admitting privileges at a Lubbock hospital and hasn’t performed surgical abortions since April, clinic director Angela Martinez said.

Before that point, the clinic had offered surgical abortions up to 13 weeks and six days, and referred pregnancies upward of that to Dallas, Austin and other major cities, Martinez said.

To have admitting privileges, a clinic must be located within 30 miles of a hospital and would be required to admit 30 patients per year, a rarity in the abortion field, Tierce said.

“It wouldn’t change the way clinics currently operate or the process if there are complications,” she said. “It’s an unreal hoop that will be impossible for many clinics to jump through.”

Tierce said the requirement to upgrade facilities to surgical centers would be expensive and has less to do with safety than architectural changes, like lighting, hallways and locker rooms. Clinics that perform later-term procedures already comply with the law, she said.

Although Martinez said it was up to the board of the Lubbock clinic as to whether or not to make those changes, she thinks meeting the new requirements would involve a major renovation.

“I think that we have our own medical standards and procedures that we follow and if there are complications, we follow protocol, and it’s unfair that they’re wanting to shut down (clinics),” she said. “We see quite a few women from (Amarillo), New Mexico and all over the area. ... It would frustrate women to drive to Dallas or San Antonio in order to have (an abortion).”

The requirement doesn’t go into effect until September 2014.

“We’re going to continue to see patients as long as we can,” Martinez said. “They are our No. 1 priority, so women can have access to safe abortions.”

Should the new regulations force the majority of clinics around the state to close, Tierce doubts the remaining facilities would be able to handle an increased caseload.

“The clinics we work with already can’t meet the demand, and I don’t know how they would be able to take on patients from more locations,” she said.

“There are only so many hours in a day.”

A 2012 study in the Obstetrics and Gynecology Journal argued abortion is safer than childbirth, and showed that between 1998 and 2005, there were 8.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, while there were .6 deaths per 100,000 abortions.

“The Legislature should be focusing on other ways to improve women’s health, and closing clinics only endangers women, because the data never shows the incidence goes down, because women find other ways to terminate unwanted pregnancies,” Tierce said.

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The actual number of deaths per 100,000 abortions is ACTUALLY 100,000.6, not 0.6. A mothers's right to kill will be looked back on in future generations as morally reprehensible as what we see when we look back into our history of slavery.